Very much NSFW: Jean-Efflam Bavouzet/Quatuor Danel at Wigmore Hall reviewed

‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score bulges with clues: piu dolce; espressivo sempre; eventually (and steamiest of all if you’re even slightly attuned to the absinthe-dazed atmosphere of French Wagnerism) tenero ma con passione — ‘tenderly, but with passion’. It was too much for Camille Saint-Saëns, who played the piano in the world première in 1880. The gossip was that Saint-Saëns knew of Franck’s infatuation with the composer Augusta Holmès, and was repulsed by music that — to jealous ears — sounded like the one-handed diary of a 58-year-old lecher. As he reached the final page, with its dedication ‘À mon ami Camille Saint-Saëns’, he stamped from the platform and refused to return. A stagehand swept the score into a wastepaper bin. When Franck published the Quintet a few months later, the dedication stood but the words ‘mon ami’ had been deleted.

There were no inhibitions in Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s performance at the Wigmore Hall, though the four string players of the Quatuor Danel did their best to preserve some sort of modesty. The Danels have been at the top of the French quartet scene since the 1990s, and they can pivot on a centime from sculpted sensuality to needle-point pointillism. They’d opened with Debussy’s String Quartet, in a performance that sounded at times like it was about to fly apart with the sheer centrifugal force of the group’s tempi. (The leader, Marc Danel, practically fell out of his chair in the final bars.) But the Franck was different — very different, with the Quartet barely clinging on as they rode the foaming, mane-tossing beast of Bavouzet’s piano playing.

If you wanted a sonic representation of a once-respectable organ loft composer (Franck’s pupils called him ‘Pater Seraphicus’) trying to maintain classical proprieties while simultaneously hosing his audience down with a jet wash of hormonally charged chromaticism, this one was very definitely Not Safe For Work.